WASHINGTON -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) predicted on Tuesday a relatively easy path to passage for the bipartisan "gang of eight" immigration bill, saying he thinks he can get eight Republican votes and nearly all Democratic members.

“I talked about this to a number of my senators today, and what he wanted to say is they haven’t done a whip count on this yet," Reid said in a taping for "To the Point," according to the Las Vegas Sun. "I think we have 60 votes. Remember, we start out at 55 Democrats. I think the most I’ll lose is two or three. Let’s say I wind up with 52 Democrats. I only need eight Republicans, and I already have four, so that should be pretty easy."

The bill must cross a 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster, but not everyone is convinced the bill is there yet. Reid's comments were in contrast to ones made last week by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), a member of the gang of eight. There are four Republicans -- Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) -- in the group who also support the bill; Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) voted for it in the Judiciary Committee, although he has not yet said whether he will support its passage on the Senate floor.

"We need to add more votes on the floor," Menendez told Univision anchor Jorge Ramos in an interview that aired Sunday on "Al Punto." "That means that the community in your state, in every state, should be contacting your state’s two U.S. senators saying that they want comprehensive immigration reform, that they are going to judge their political future based on this vote. And if we do this, both in the Senate and, later, with the members of the House of Representatives, we can achieve the victory that we want."

"It's certainly gonna pass the Senate," Reid told host George Stephanopoulos of immigration reform. "And it would be a bad day for our country and a bad day for the Republican Party if they continue standing in the way of this. So the answer is yes."

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11 Ways Immigration Reform Helps The Economy

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Immigration reform would reduce the federal deficit by $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years, according to an April analysis by the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank.

Expelling the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States would cost $2.6 trillion over the next 10 years, according to CNBC. That's because it costs the government more than $8,000 to deport each person.

Immigration reform would help bolster Social Security because more legal workers would mean more people contributing payroll taxes to its trust fund, according to an analysis from the Social Security administration. Undocumented workers already contribute $15 billion per year to Social Security.

More than a quarter of technology and engineering firms started between 1995 and 2005 had a foreign-born owner, according to the Washington Post. One of the founders of Yahoo!, Jerry Yang, is an immigrant from Taiwan.

The immigration reform bill proposed by the "gang of eight" senators would save $410 billion over the next decade, according to an analysis from Gordon Gray, the director of fiscal policy at the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank. The savings would come largely from a boost in GDP resulting from undocumented immigrants gaining citizenship and in turn likely making more money.

Companies like Microsoft and Google have said that immigration reform would help them by allowing for more H1B visas, a special kind of visa geared toward highly-skilled immigrants. The tech giants say they can't find enough qualified people in the U.S. to fill their staffing needs.

U.S.-born workers see between a 0.1 and 0.6 percent boost in wages on average with an increase in immigration, according to a January report from the Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative of the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. That's because immigrant workers bring skills with them that complement those of native-born workers, leading to new jobs.

Immigrants are more than twice as likely than native-born Americans to start new businesses, according to a White House report on immigration reform.

Immigration reform would boost GDP by $1.5 trillion -- or about 1 percent -- over 10 years, according to an estimate from UCLA professor Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda cited by CNBC.

Businesses owned by immigrants created 4.7 million jobs in the U.S. in 2007, according to a White House report on immigration reform.

Though many critics of immigration reform argue against the cost of providing increased public benefits, analysts say higher spending is not a likely consequence. A Congressional Budget Analysis of George W. Bush's 2007 immigration reform proposal found that it would cost the government $23 billion in more public services, but bring in $48 billion in revenue, according to the Washington Post.